Unlayered: The Smart but lazy Identity

A star is born (or so they said) …

I started first grade when I was four. My parents noticed I could follow along with my older sister’s schoolwork, so they skipped me ahead, and they were right about that. I kept up. I excelled. I was the youngest kid in every classroom, and the valedictorian through most of them.

I loved being the “smart one.” It was the only trait I ever heard praised. Everything else about me was “too much.” Too loud. Too emotional. Too dramatic. But always smart.  Looking back, I was a textbook case of undiagnosed ADHD and hypersensitivity. I wasn’t just “difficult”, I was overwhelmed, under-stimulated, and under-supported. But no one saw that. They just called me intense... but smart. I took on that identity and held on to it for dear life.

Up until high school, it was easy to validate the identity. effortlessly accumulating straight As and praise. But I also absorbed another belief: “You’re lazy. You’re not living up to your potential.” My mother said it. I believed it. I became it.

When I got to a good university where studies were hard and classes complex, that effortless brilliance stopped working.

For the first time, I was struggling, and I had no tools to cope with the struggle- I had never learned to. The fear crept in: What if there was no potential to live up to? What if I was never smart, just lucky? That fear paralyzed me. And so, I stopped trying all together. It felt safer to fail by not trying than to try and prove the worst true. If I didn’t succeed, it wasn’t because I wasn’t smart. It was because I didn’t try. I could’ve, I told myself. I’m smart. I’m just lazy.

For years, I clung to that identity. It protected me.

But it also kept me small…

I embraced mediocrity, coasted on the bare minimum, and called it survival.

My potential stayed untouched, preserved as an idea, worshipped as an ideal.

I was stuck, afraid to test it and risk proving it wasn’t real.

I justified it with the usual suspects:

I just don’t care enough.

I’m not interested.

This isn’t even what I want to do.

It felt safer to pretend I was above it than to admit I feared I wasn’t enough.

This is the story of how I broke free

Of what I’ve learned about potential, pressure, and the kind of burnout no one talks about.

The kind that starts not with failure, but with early success.

The Breakthrough

It all started with therapy, as it often does. It was there that I first shined light on, and began shedding one by one, the multiple layers of limiting beliefs and coping mechanisms I had accumulated throughout my life. It was in that space that l, as Dr Nicole Lepera says, “started doing the work”, the work I would later learn to name and frame through my NLP and coaching training. In what follows, I’ll attempt to summarize my key insights about what lies beneath a seemingly simple belief: 'I am smart but lazy’, blending personal experience with academic understanding.

1. The "Talent is innate" trap: 

If there’s only one idea you take from this, let it be this one.

Many of us have internalized the belief that talent is something you’re born with, that you either have it, or you don’t. It’s one of the beliefs I’ve had (and still have) the hardest time letting go of. You’d catch me in a park on a sunny day, painting for the very first time in my life, and secretly hoping I’m some kind of genius just now discovering her hidden talent.

Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule from Outliers suggests mastery comes through practice. Though the idea has its flaws, it overlooks quality, access, and yes, natural talent. It does offer a useful counterpoint to the more damaging myth: that talent is purely innate.

Believing that locks us into a fixed mindset.

In Mindset, Carol Dweck explains how fixed mindsets form from rigid self-theories like “I’m bad at math” or “I’m not creative.” They become identities we think can’t change. This belief is more present in society than we realize, it's embedded in the way we think and showcased in the way we speak. Spanish, out of the five languages I speak, is the only one that clearly differentiates the temporary I am from the permanent one. And yet, even then, we say “soy mala estudiante” instead of “estoy mala estudiante”, as if being a bad student is a permanent identity rather than a temporary state.

A growth mindset, by contrast, sees ability as something you can develop through effort. It fosters resilience and a willingness to learn.

In school, many teachers would “identify” and segregate the smart kids from those who were “not,” overvaluing natural talent and first impressions. This often demonstrated the dangers of a fixed mindset in the creation a self-fulfilling prophecy by limiting interaction, stimulation, and encouragement for the students they had unconsciously “given up on.”

This all shaped my belief that being smart was innate. If I didn’t already have it, I couldn't develop it.

I was stuck in a fixed mindset.

2. I’m Only Worthy If I Succeed

Now this is a tricky one, because this belief can lead you in two very different, even opposite directions. On one hand, you might become a performance machine, endlessly chasing grades, diplomas, titles, salaries, awards… you name it. And yet, no matter how much you achieve, you feel empty inside, like nothing is or ever will be enough.

Or, as it was in my case, you go the other way. Same belief, different response: you detach completely from all the above.

Since we’re exploring here on the “smart but lazy” identity, I’ll save the overachiever one for another time and speak to my people: the underperformers.

In my life, through my training and the people I’ve encountered, I’ve come across underperformers in all kinds of disguises, creative outfits designed to hide fear and pain.

There was the outfit I wore for a while: the bohemian. The bohemian is the most romantic of them all. Detachment dressed up as humbleness and noble ideals. I’d say, “I don’t want any of it: the promotion, the money, the materialistic wins. I just want to do the minimum and live simply. I don’t need much to be happy…” That was my speech for the longest time.

But the truth is: I wasn’t above it. I was afraid. I didn’t believe I could have it, so I told myself, and others, that I didn’t want it. That way, it wouldn’t hurt if I didn’t get it.I did the same with love. For years, I didn’t think I was worthy of being loved, so I convinced myself I didn’t need it, didn’t want it. And of course, life responded accordingly.

Another outfit I’ve seen is the anarchist or anti-system persona. It says things like:

“I’m above this capitalist world and its shiny success symbols.”

“The system is broken; I want no part of it.”

Let me be clear: bohemian and anti-capitalist ideologies are valid. But they can also become socially acceptable masks we wear to hide our insecurities.

How can you tell the difference?

Well, let’s just say my gastronomy-loving, rooftop-dining, travel-filled lifestyle was anything but bohemian.

We can’t go through all the disguises, it’s basically Paris Fashion Week out there, but a few more favorites include:

The Forever Student: Still hiding behind “just one more course,” afraid to test their knowledge in the real world.

The Spiritual Escapist: “what can I even do, mercury is retrograding!”.

But if all these disguises were part of a catwalk, the closing showstopper would be the true icon of self-worth issues: The perfectionist- a costume we wear with such pride and superiority, when it often hides the final underlying belief we will go over in this article: The black and white thinking

3. Black and white thinking:

In school, and I mean all 18 years of it, without a single exception. I was the notebook-less kid. Back then, we still used chalk slates to copy down the lessons, and being the walking ADHD template I was, my brain never cooperated long enough to let me take proper notes. My default focus mechanism was the classic neurodivergent move: doodling.

But once in a blue moon, and blue moons usually coincided with the start of a school year, a new term, or a fresh class. I’d get this burst of resolutions: “This time, I’ll do it right.” I'd become a note-taking goddess for a hot second. My pages would be immaculate: color-coded, underlined, organized. I’d even tear out a whole sheet if I made one tiny mistake. It had to be perfect.

Of course, it never lasted. A few days in, I was back to square one: absolutely no notes, just freestyle learning and rogue doodles in the margins.

Looking back, I see it now for what it was: black and white thinking. A classic cognitive distortion. Either I do it perfectly, or I don’t do it at all. There was no room for messy effort, no space for in-betweens. If I couldn’t sustain perfection, I’d give up entirely.

And this mindset didn’t stop at notetaking.

I’d apply for one job. If I didn’t hear back, I’d immediately think: “I’m not enough for this kind of role.”

I’d try a dance class once, mess up a move, and decide “This isn’t for me.”

This all or nothing thinking was my biggest saboteur. And I now understand that it was also a defense mechanism, a way to avoid discomfort, rejection, or the dreaded feeling of “not being enough.” Because if I failed after trying, then I would have no excuse. But if I didn’t try, or if I stopped trying early. I could always fall back on “I’m actually great, I just didn’t apply myself.”

So how do we move forward?

How do we start shedding the layers of this “smart but lazy” identity we’ve used to protect ourselves?

Have you ever been scared by a strange noise at night? Before you know what it is, your mind jumps to the worst possible explanation: a ghost, a break-in, something dangerous. But once you get up and check and realize it’s just the fridge cracking or a pipe expanding, you go back to sleep. The noise is still there, but now that you’ve named it, it no longer has power over you. You go back to sleep.

Healing is like that.

It’s not about erasing the noise: fear, doubt, the past.

It’s about turning on the light. Naming the monsters. Seeing that the thing that felt so big, so shameful, so defining, was just a part of you, not all of you.

“Smart but lazy”? It was never the truth. Just a shadow cast by misunderstanding, perfectionism, and fear.

And like all shadows, it fades when you face it...

This is what doing the work really means.

You don’t have to become someone else. You just have to return to yourself, beneath the labels, the layers, the lies.

And maybe, just maybe, start taking messy notes again